Why Saying “I'm Sorry” Isn't Good Enough: The Ethics of Corporate ...

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Ethics Corporate Apologies analogous to one Aristotle makes in his Rhetoric. Someone who can find the available means of persuasion in every given case is a good rhetorician. But it does not follow that the rhetorician will be able to convince under all circumstances. Rather he is in a situation similar to that of the physician: the latter has a complete grasp of his art only if he neglects nothing that might heal his patient, though he is not able to heal every patient. Similarly, the rhetorician has a complete grasp of his method, if he discovers the available means of persuasion, though he is not able to convince everybody (Rap, 2010, 1). The recent explosion in corporate apologies poses its own challenges for executives trying to make amends. As Adams (2000) observed more than a decade ago, CEOs now love to say “I’m sorry.” If audiences begin to perceive corporate apologies as pro forma, these listeners may dismiss all executive apologies as mere ritual theater, regardless of how well they crafted and ethically good they are. Lastly, there are a host of factors whose impact on perceived trustworthiness has only begun to be researched and whose impact on audience reception of an apology may or may not be significant when combined with all of the other elements discussed above. For example, women who wear light makeup designed to make their lips and eyes stand out relative to their skin may be deemed more competent and trustworthy than women who wear either no makeup or heavy makeup (Louis, 2011). Executives with “baby faces” are apparently spontaneously judged to be more trustworthy (Gorn et all, 2008). The appearance of the apologizing CEO likely does matter, but would having a baby face suffice to make this corporate apology believable if he or she did not show any empathy 44
Ethics Corporate Apologies or failed to specify how the company would attempt to lessen the harm it has caused going forward? I could find no research that situated appearance effects within the larger rhetorical context so it is hard to know how to assess the importance of such effects on actual apology efficacy. Furthermore, the audience’s actual reception of a particular corporate apology may tell us little about how ethical that apology is. A racially biased audience, for example, might find Asian faces less trustworthy than white European faces, but this has to be irrelevant to the question of whether the apology by an Asian CEO is, in fact, worthy of less trust than that of a Caucasian counterpart. For all of these reasons, actual audience reception of any given apology is a highly contingent and problematic business. Fortunately, the ethical goodness of the apology does not depend entirely on its actual reception but on whether the apology’s logos, ethos and pathos are such as to make the apology, in principle, trustworthy. CEOs can and do offer ethically better and worse apologies. This article has outlined ways in which corporate apologies can be delivered in a more authentic fashion. I have sought to move the discussion of corporate apologies beyond the current emphasis, which we find in much of the communications and management literature, on apology efficacy or on audience reception of CEOs’ statements. Scholars need also to explore the factors that make for ethically good apologies. In particular, I hope that other scholars will join and extend this attempt to examine how organizational complexity and the public context of corporate apologies give rise to ethical criteria for apologizing well that are distinct from the criteria we use for evaluating personal apologies in our private lives. Copyright © Society for Business Ethics. This paper is forthcoming in Business Ethics Quarterly. The non‐copyedited version is provided here as a service for personal scholarly use only. Any other use is subject to the same rights and permissions terms as articles published in BEQ. 45
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